Friday, December 6, 2013

Aux barricades, comrades!France toys with its next revolution

Mon dieu! Where to begin? the French government, in a bout of historical amnesia, has decided to erect a nationwide network of electronic
"éco-tax" barriers straddling its major highways (which have been
privatized into corporate-owned toll-roads, but that is another matter) to collect an environmental tax
upon the country's long-distance truckers.

Well, apparently this was the tax too far, the impot that broke the
camel's back, and Brittany—that poor, agrarian and fiercely self-aware region
that French nationalism never fully managed to tame—has gone into open revolt.
Red Phrygian caps, or "red bonnets," symbol of the French revolution of 1789, have become all the rage, sported by enraged citoyens who gather to wave the Breton flag and to set fire to these newly erected electronic tax barriers, while the nation's truckers have organized to block the country's major vehicular arteries for the last several weekends.

Open revolt. That, in a nutshell, is what is currently
brewing en ce pays-ci, which coincides with record levels of popular discontent
with the government and a record-low approval rate for the Président de la
République, François Hollande. Hollande has plumbed the lowest depths
of approval (and conversely the apex of popular disapproval), reaching 16%
overall approval in the latest national polling—just nine percentage points ahead of the US Congress.

Meanwhile, the country's préfets, akin to county executives, sent a confidential, leaked memo to the Elysée that stated in the starkest of
terms that conditions in France are a "tinderbox," that the
populace has never been more resentful of the unrelenting onslaught of
increasing taxes and stagnating incomes, and that the government had better
take heed of, and gingerly diffuse, this volatile situation or face a "fronde sociale," or popular revolt.

A few tidbits of history, to put all this in perspective.
The last time France had a revolution, in 1789, it was incited by increasingly onerous taxation by a deeply indebted government, culminating with the construction of a physical Berlin wall of tax barriers about Paris, imprisoning the city's populace (we even blogged about it, here).

Also note the uncanny resemblance of President Hollande to
Louis XVI, and the uncanny resemblance of his policies to those of the late,
beheaded monarch: blind allegiance to
the status quo in the face of increasing popular discontent during a prolonged period of deepening economic adversity. One should
also remark that Hollande shows none of the creativity or intestinal fortitude
necessary to reddress the mounting crisis of confidence in the
competence and direction of the French government itself, to say nothing of a fundamantal realignment, overwhelmingly demanded by the citizenry, of its implacably oppressive tax structure.

Today, the New York Times reports that the
populist, far-right Front National is the most popular political party in
France, with the Socialist Party of Hollande trailing badly. You do not need to
be an oracle or a political pundit to divine that the present moment is about the absolute worst time for the government to re-erect a modern version of the tax barriers that incited the French
Revolution.